This invention relates generally to software tools for saving social networking data, and more particularly to bookmarking advertisements and other content items that are displayed to a user of the social networking system.
A social networking system receives content from its users and displays that content to other users via various channels. In the newsfeed channel, for example, a feed of stories for a particular user is periodically updated with new content as it is provided to the social networking system. Newsfeed content therefore has a high decay rate as content displayed in a newsfeed story is updated frequently. For example, content shared by a user may appear in a newsfeed the day it is shared, but may not appear in a newsfeed within a few hours or a few days. Therefore, users who would like to access a particular story in the newsfeed at a later time may not be able to find that newsfeed story.
The same problem exists for advertisements displayed in the social networking system. In the social networking system environment, advertisements may include a social context, where the advertisement communicates an action of one of the user's connections taken in connections with a thing being advertised. For these types of advertisements, users may be even more interested in interacting with the advertisement. However, advertisements are often selected for a user and displayed each time the user refreshes a page. Accordingly, if a user notices an interesting advertisement, the user must immediately interact with the advertisement or risk never seeing that advertisement again. This may be undesirable, since this requires the user to switch attention to the advertisement instead o what the user is currently viewing on the social networking system.
Social networking system users can similarly navigate to other users' profile page to view content shared by others. Since such content is always available on users' profile page, it generally does not have a high decay rate, but it may be similarly difficult for users to revisit the shared content at a later time. For example, users may not remember the name of the sharing user or may not remember to navigate to another user's profile page at a later time. If the shared content is a link to a webpage or a system outside the social networking system, a user may be able revisit the shared content by navigating to the webpage and bookmarking it using a browser's toolbar. Such a method of bookmarking items is disadvantageous because the social networking system may not be able to track a user's actions or interests once the user navigates out of the social networking system.
Accordingly, systems are needed to enable social networking system users to save content, including advertisements, to view and interact with later in the social networking system environment.